MikeA
08-16-2010, 12:44 PM
Many of you probably have never played "Text Adventure Games".
This is a "free site" and they have made available many different free Text Adventures.
http://freearcade.com/textadventures.html
When you get there, look for the Scott Adams Adventures. Then select the one called 'Adventureland'. I think that was his first one. I first saw it in the early 80's and played it on an old (new back then!) Commodore VIC20 computer. That computer had only 4k of memory (NOT 4mb!)
Anyway, these "Text Adventures" were the forerunners of the RPG games (Role Playing Games) and were some of the very first "entertainment" programs put out for the fledgling computer industry. I guess maybe the first game besides tic-tac-toe was the Star Trek Strategy Game. Whatever. These Adventure games really caught my attention so much that I became involved with them as a programmer!
Any programmer could sit down and write an adventure if he or she had the skills to design a program. But what I did was design a program that would allow ANYONE to develop an adventure game, limited only by their own imagination!
These adventures were in themselves simple. Each location was called a room. In that room you had the potential of going through exits in any of the walls (north, south, east or west) and also UP and DOWN. In some cases, there were hidden exits invoked by magic words.
Each Room in the adventure also had a table of values that could contain treasures, hints, useful objects that you could pick up and take with you. The objectives of the adventure might just be survival. Or it might be a quest to accumulate points scored by finding treasure. Actually the objective could be about anything that the person using the generator could come up with...limited only by the author's imagination.
The first Adventure game that I created using the generator was one based on the house and property belonging to my In-Laws. I have a nephew who at the time was in something like the 5th or 6th grade and who wanted to know how programs worked. That was the real reason I developed the generator: To show Bill the type logic needed to develop programs.
I didn't tell the real objective of the game. I made it non-obvious that the setting was his Grandparents house! But it was laid out exactly in the floor plan of their house and had many fixtures in the description that matched things in the house. For example: Clair was on the volunteer Fire department and as a volunteer, he had a special telephone with an obnoxious ring. Above the telephone was a police scanner.
During play of the game, the player would "see" blinking red lights with some conversation going on that could not be understood even when other people were not present. Then randomly, you would hear this earsplitting noise (the fire phone ringing) followed by the sound of heavy Ogres stomping (this was Clair running out of the house to get to the firestation located less than a block away.) Each room of the house was described in obscure detail with hints throughout that it was laid out like Clair and Daisy's house. Oh, there were diversions such as a secret tunnel that led from a secret door in the basement out to the garage with interspersed side tunnels which were dug by trolls and goblins of course.
The objective of the game, though now spelled out in the instructions, was to just survive until you finally figured out that the Adventure Setting was their Grandpa's House!
Before it was all over, almost everyone in the family took a crack at developing an adventure!
To succeed in these adventure games, one must completely immerse into the spirit of the game and then try to get inside the author's head to figure out what it is that he is wanting you to do to overcome the trials of the game and accomplish the objective.
This is a "free site" and they have made available many different free Text Adventures.
http://freearcade.com/textadventures.html
When you get there, look for the Scott Adams Adventures. Then select the one called 'Adventureland'. I think that was his first one. I first saw it in the early 80's and played it on an old (new back then!) Commodore VIC20 computer. That computer had only 4k of memory (NOT 4mb!)
Anyway, these "Text Adventures" were the forerunners of the RPG games (Role Playing Games) and were some of the very first "entertainment" programs put out for the fledgling computer industry. I guess maybe the first game besides tic-tac-toe was the Star Trek Strategy Game. Whatever. These Adventure games really caught my attention so much that I became involved with them as a programmer!
Any programmer could sit down and write an adventure if he or she had the skills to design a program. But what I did was design a program that would allow ANYONE to develop an adventure game, limited only by their own imagination!
These adventures were in themselves simple. Each location was called a room. In that room you had the potential of going through exits in any of the walls (north, south, east or west) and also UP and DOWN. In some cases, there were hidden exits invoked by magic words.
Each Room in the adventure also had a table of values that could contain treasures, hints, useful objects that you could pick up and take with you. The objectives of the adventure might just be survival. Or it might be a quest to accumulate points scored by finding treasure. Actually the objective could be about anything that the person using the generator could come up with...limited only by the author's imagination.
The first Adventure game that I created using the generator was one based on the house and property belonging to my In-Laws. I have a nephew who at the time was in something like the 5th or 6th grade and who wanted to know how programs worked. That was the real reason I developed the generator: To show Bill the type logic needed to develop programs.
I didn't tell the real objective of the game. I made it non-obvious that the setting was his Grandparents house! But it was laid out exactly in the floor plan of their house and had many fixtures in the description that matched things in the house. For example: Clair was on the volunteer Fire department and as a volunteer, he had a special telephone with an obnoxious ring. Above the telephone was a police scanner.
During play of the game, the player would "see" blinking red lights with some conversation going on that could not be understood even when other people were not present. Then randomly, you would hear this earsplitting noise (the fire phone ringing) followed by the sound of heavy Ogres stomping (this was Clair running out of the house to get to the firestation located less than a block away.) Each room of the house was described in obscure detail with hints throughout that it was laid out like Clair and Daisy's house. Oh, there were diversions such as a secret tunnel that led from a secret door in the basement out to the garage with interspersed side tunnels which were dug by trolls and goblins of course.
The objective of the game, though now spelled out in the instructions, was to just survive until you finally figured out that the Adventure Setting was their Grandpa's House!
Before it was all over, almost everyone in the family took a crack at developing an adventure!
To succeed in these adventure games, one must completely immerse into the spirit of the game and then try to get inside the author's head to figure out what it is that he is wanting you to do to overcome the trials of the game and accomplish the objective.